It’s been a good week for Sixers fans. The team used just one first-rounder from its draft-pick surplus to move up to the No. 1 spot in the NBA Draft, where it will take Markelle Fultz. That gives the team a young corps of Fultz, Ben Simmons, Dario Šarić, and, of course, Joel Embiid. No one really knows if these guys…

Stanford University in the springtime is immaculate. There are no clouds in the sky and none of the aerated haze of the East Bay or the fog of San Francisco. Off to the west, the Santa Cruz Mountains gently form the outer boundary of Palo Alto. As I got lost looking for the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s…

Sam Hinkie emerged from his self-imposed hibernation this afternoon to update his many fans on Twitter about his whereabouts and future plans. Tweeting from a Palo Alto Starbucks, he wrote that he was taking a “gap year” in Silicon Valley, where he would learn “even more about how what’s happening here will impact the…

The laughs arrive early in this longform profile of former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie, by ESPN Mag contributing writer Jordan Brenner, beginning with the headline: “The man who just can’t win: Sam Hinkie (finally) speaks.” Specifically, I like the parenthetical “finally,” not-so-subtly advancing the…

The Deadspin Awards are in July, and we need our readers to decide the winners of these prestigious honors. Today, we ask you to consider a weighty matter: Who deserves the Sam Hinkie Memorial Award for Worst General Manager?

Professional engineer of failure Sam Hinkie quit the Philadelphia 76ers last night via a batshit, borderline incoherent, hilariously self-congratulatory 13-page resignation letter, inadvertently rendering into generous flattery every joke made at his expense over the three years he spent failing at nearly every facet…

Sixers GM Sam Hinkie unexpectedly resigned yesterday and left behind a rambling, legitimately nutzoid 13-page letter that I hope will serve as a giant blinking warning sign to any future employer of his, be it an NBA team (fat chance) or an investment firm or the sales force at Lyft, which is where Hinkie spiritually…

Newly former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie’s “Process” encompassed a number of tenets, but its basic philosophical underpinning was that the NBA draft is the best and cheapest way to build a contender, and that the NBA draft is a crapshoot. A roll of the dice.

The Philadelphia 76ers, those smirking pioneers of a remarkably misguided, anti-fun, actuarial, game theory-ass approach to NBA basketball, are now starting to realize that you can’t exactly build a winning basketball team while ignoring, well, the basketball. Back in December, the NBA more or less 86'd Sam Hinkie’s…